Exploring technological convergence based on value proposition types of IT firms

Throughout the past decade, technology convergence has received particular attention. The creation of synergies, blurring of industry boundaries, integration, and overlapping of market, are all used to describe convergence. The convergence phenomenon has been mainly observed and discussed in Information Technology sectors, and the technical changes due to the convergence gives rise to the creation of new values. IT innovations diffuse into existing products and come to form a new integral part of the goods. Patents play an increasingly important role in innovation, and patent data are used to indicate innovative activity of companies, industries and countries. This is an exploratory study to examine and to compare global IT firms' technological convergence, using patent co-classification network analysis, which visualizes the interactions between different technology fields.